After reading gianran's comment, I realize that he is among a group of those in decline. Although I would not categorize them all as technically inept, they tend to be less willing to be open [and honest] to alternative technologies. This is, perhaps, why the traditional music industry has been left stagnant (deservedly) and the movie industry suffering some of the same ill effects. Had they realized the network effects of digital music media (and the trends seen as early as the late 90's), they would have headed off the "young/poor pirates on peer to peer site like E-Mule" as you call them (us). The movie industry must heed their failures. I still purchase DVDs (I do not see the value of BD). When I purchase CD's I rip them and convert them to FLAC to retain their quality. I would rather skip the retailer and purchase it directly online, which is why my purchases of music have declined to approximately one CD/year on average (music content quality is another issue which coincides with that of the movie industry, however, that is another topic tending on the subjective side). When too great a focus is placed on one area of technology, one must begin to “Ask why?”. My favourite Hitchcock movie (North by Northwest) won't be any better on a 1080p television. Hector Berlioz' “Symphony Fantastique” won't sound discernibly better using DVD audio on my Hi-Fi stereo system. The onus is on the entertainment and A/V industry. Convince me.

Media has been evolving toward less mechanically dependant technologies leading to a decline in materials needed and transaction costs (i.e. distribution) benefiting the consumer with more durable, convenient and vivid technologies. Fixed media (CD-ROM - Read Only Memory), as their state suggests, leads to an inability to upgrade and often leads to expensive, non-democratic format wars where marketing battles confuse the public and leave them uncertain and therefore often uninterested. Rewritable flash media may be the next generation, perhaps even integrated in one's television removing the need for a separate device and fewer cables. Processors are powerful enough to decode most video formats (using codecs) via software. This would allow for easier feature and capacity upgrades. I wouldn't give Blu-Ray a chance. Sony's hardball tactics tend to sow their own seeds of failure. Beta-Max, Mini-Disc and now Blu-Ray. I'd bet BD lasts no more than a couple of years.

The copyright protection built in to blu-ray is pointless and irritating for the user. It will not prevent professional copiers at all, and hamper only a little, the talented amateur. People who don't worry about ultra high definition will just watch copies filmed from HDTV screens - they might appreciate the extra quality that you get if you film an HDTV screen, but probably not!

What has been lost in this, is the whole purpose of the technology; what problem is it solving? It has benefits of value to experts, but not to the wider public. People want cheap, on-demand, unrestricted (by censorship/geographically decided release date/ or whatever)films with an adequate quality of sound and vision. Great films suspend our disbelief sufficiently that the quality of the display becomes irrelevant. Only if the technology stutters do we complain - the quality of DVD is perfectly sufficient, whether on disc or download, for all practical purposes.

Davezilla, Gauchito Gil, and sindark are all correct. Blu-ray is DOA. It's just to painful to use. Rent a Blu-ray movie; it might play, it might not; the Blu-ray Digital Rights Management system is horrible; in my experience, 20% of the Blu-ray titles refuse to play on my computer, another 20% will balk at playing until I screw around with settings and cable connections that work all the time with the remaining 60% of Blu-ray titles.Then there is the software to play the videos. The software from Cyberlinks kinda works with Windows XP after about three upgrades and jumping through hoops of fire, but for Windows Vista, forget it, unless you feel like giving Cyberlinks another $80 for an upgrade that may or may not be any better.Last but not least is the cost to produce a Blu-ray disk. I'm a video producer; before a single Blu-ray disk is made for a mass production run there are a couple sets of royalty fees to be paid that add thousands to the up front cost. No such fees exist for making DVDs. If a producer is just making a short run of 300 disks, the added $3000-5000 plus the higher cost of the blank disk compared to a standard DVD disk kicks the production cost up to $15 - 20 more per unit compared to DVDs. A DVD can be produced, with a disk, labeling and packaging for about $1.80 per unit; on a similar short run, a Blu-ray is 10 times the price.Not only are the Blu-ray disks more expensive to make, but only a small percentage of people have the equipment to play them anyway. The market is too small to bother with.Playback of a streaming or down loadable HD video is nearly universal. There are no reproduction cost. There are no Digital Rights Management hoops to jump through unless a producer is dumb enough to add them. Check out Hulu or any other site that is streaming HD. Its not as good as Blu-ray, but its getting better everyday, and upfront its free.Then there is the software to play the videos. The software from Cyberlink kinda works with Windows XP after about three upgrades, but for Windows Vista forget it unless you feel like giving Cyberlinks another $80 for an upgrade.

We've been renting movies (including some HD) on our AppleTV for a few months now, and it works fine. The extra detail on a good HD picture is a little distracting at first, then quickly becomes 'normal'. I noticed when our local networks started to change over to HD broadcasting a couple of years ago, the makeup artists had to relearn some of their techniques (the pre-HD versions looked like stage makeup.)Also, Sony does produce a superior HD picture, but it has more to do with the quality of their digital image processing rather than the absolute number of lines. To the human eye on a moving picture, the difference between good 1080i and 1080p is virtually indistinguishable.Perhaps they should modify the Blu-Ray standard to incorporate 2160i!

And HDCP has indeed caused Apple users the most extraordinary problems anyway - see for example:-http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/17/apple-itunes-multimedia-throwing-hdcp-flags-on-new-macbook-mac/So you cannot even use an old display without HDCP to view a downloaded non-HD movie!

I fear you are not very techie and have missed the issue. For some years the competition has indeed been between download and disk formats. But there is still a genuine download problem with very high resolution (ie better than current display), in that the broadband capability is not keeping up. So although we may all eventually have downloadable super-definition (>HD) users may be meanwhile faced with a choice between a HD plastic disk (or broadcast) and a downloaded upsampled version. Experience with audio may not be a perfect guide but users have strikingly preferred the less good downloadable MP3 to the superior plastic disk CD. This is partly driven by ever-better MP3 decoders, but then of course upsampling can also be done better and better. And as fibre-to-the-home rolls out all plastic disks will die anyway so Blu-Ray must make it past DVD in the next decade or so or fail since here will surely be no disk-style successor - why would there be? (of course many of Apple's latest machines have no optical drive at all!).

High density plastic disks are here to stay, but they may not use the Blu-Ray proprietary formula in the future.We need to separate out the technology of putting a lot of data on a drive from the proprietary software that runs the player and the editing industry that compiles these disks for mass consumption.I was particularly impressed that you mentioned Faroudja in your article. I have worked on a product which incorporates a Faroudja processor onto a video board that installs in a PC and does nothing but upconvert DVD's to whatever resolution you care to drive, and CRT projectors have long been giving us much better resolution (ok, at enormous cost) than LCD, plasma, or other fixed pixel technologies have been able to offer. If you see a Faroudja product in this environment, you would be much more impressed. Faroudja own a lot of patents, and even more secret know-how, that they have built directly into silicon for people to design boards around. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, the number of competent designers using Faroudja products is very small, and the home theater market has been dominated by salesmen rather than superb technicians who can install a system for true theater performance.You may recall that Microsoft was an early entrant into the HD wars with their own format, WMV-HD. A few disks were published, and with my Faroudja card, I was able to cue up the DVD and WMV-HD versions to play simultaneously, and output to the same projection device, with me toggling between the versions to illustrate the dufferences. This amazed quite a few people, but what really amazed them was the fact that there was actually more detail on the DVD version than the WMV-HD version!You see, the problem lies in the editing. When you have a very high definition format, decisions need to be made about how much of the original film noise to remove. In the movie "Step into liquid" one of the great surf movies, the wrinkly old surfer giants lost their wrinkles and the kids lost their freckles, but the picture was smooth. The DVD was much closer to film quality. The same was true for "In the shadows of Motown", another dual format disk offering.And whichever way you cut the cake, there are a whole lot of very talented editors who have engineered about 50,000 titles onto DVD, and know how to do it really well. In contrast, the HD companies, Toshiba and Sony, almost ignored the post-production community, and their editing tools were arcane and mysterious. Still are.Which is why the vast library of digital media remains in the DVD realm. The editing/conversion process requires a human touch and eye, and the real talent is not looking at film conversion to HD. Which means the huge existing entertainment library on film may never be converted to Blu-Ray. OK, all the new movies are being shot with digital movie cameras, but that is a story for another day. I made a prediction some five years ago that the major advances in entertainment hardware would be in screens and projectors. Now, more than ever, true up-sampling, as done by Faroudja and their professional ilk, cannot be compared to the $2 chips tossed into the low cost commercial players trying to up-sample the new HD screens. As these screens become even more HD, the difference in quality will become even more obvious between a Faroudja product and their $2 competition.The problem at the moment for the luxury market (Faroudja) is that the home theater industry has been so accustomed to taking huge sums of money for constructing rather dumb theater environments haven't smartened up much, and probably won't in this recession where suddenly business has fallen off a cliff. But new high-knowledge players will emerge, and I am waiting for next year, because I think that will be the time to launch a new company with a true, do-everything PC-based product, with the best of all technologies. Communications, entertainment, workspace, theater. Yes, we will have information coming to us through the Internet, and on plastic disks. DVD's are here for the foreseeable future, and Blu-Ray may have a better future with 3D movies on the horizon. But the player? It will be a computer.

I understand the potential of broadband--I am a professed Internet junkie, and the quicker you can pump me my fix, the better. But until I don't have to wait five minutes to load a two-minute 480x640 YouTube video or go outside to get decent reception on my cell phone, I will refrain from pronouncing "plastic discs" useless.

Netflix's current "Watch Instantly" movie download model works great, despite some minor early bugs. If they and other video download services provide the same kind of service for all movies available in HD, then it would seem to me Blu-ray is doomed as a mainstream format. The subscription model of Netflix appeals to millions of consumers since it is very convenient and not that many movie goers care about owning film titles, and I can't see why it would not also be a great success (either for Netflix, other services or the studios themselves) once it is capable of supplying a large number titles in HD. DVD and Blu-ray's future mainstream success perhaps depends on how the studios and other distributors continue to produce and market them available with special features. The hardcore film buffs would probably continue to buy the most popular mainstream and cult titles on disc if they continue to come with lots of desired special features that otherwise would not be available on download sites. Then again, the studios could make special features available for an extra fee on a download site, so it's hard to say how it could work down the road.

Sir - I am of the opinion that you are partially correct. Blu-Ray will not die as a format. However, given the current technology and the spiralling downward of costs for cheap broadband access, I think a more likely situation will be that Blu-Ray continues on as a "niche" product for hobbyists, similar to the current state of vinyl records amongst audiophiles; and, that this cheap bandwidth will result in a product that provides video on demand from a large central library.

As Davezilla pointed out, most consumers will merrily sacrifice some resolution for cheap, fast access and convenience. Perhaps we will see the growth of a new application (maybe they could call it iMovie?) where the user goes online via their game console or set-top box, and picks the movies they want, where they can be "rented" (downloaded with a viewing timer that will delete the content after a period of days) or "bought" (permanently available for unlimited viewing.) I think that if the library were sufficiently sized, as iTunes is, that most modern consumers would gladly choose to download and watch movies in this manner, and forego their shiny silver and gold discs that take up space, get scratched, and disappear. It would be more cost-efficient for the studios (packaging, delivery overhead) and the consumer (no need to drive to a video store that may or may not have your title on the shelves.)

A final comparison of the Blu-Ray versus DVD war would be to look at Sony's positioning of Super Audio CD in the late 1990s/early 2000s as a "higher resolution" CD, if you will. After grabbing a small market share amongst audio purists, both technologies were rendered obsolete in the span of a few years by applications such as iTunes and other peer-to-peer file-sharing systems. This seems to be the direction that Blu-Ray and DVDs are headed.

To add a little definition to HD copyright protection (HDCP) problems:1) Many early adopters of HD TV's invested big $ in plasma sets without the iniquitous HDCP capability and cannnot play Blu-Ray disks. They also could not receive HDTV transmissions if HDCP were to be implemented on broadcasts as originally planned.2) I have a Blu-Ray equipped Sony laptop with an HDMI output but it still will not output Blu-Ray to an HDCP compatible HDTV unless the laptop is set to output only to the HDTV and not both the TV and the laptop screen. This took hours of research to discover and is a pain the neck.A pox on Sony and all DHCP promoters.Finally, skin tone on TV often looks better from a regular DVD rather than Blu-Ray. We do not always want to see all the freckles, warts, etc visible with close-up HD - that's why they often airbrush magazine photos!

Your assertion that nothing except Blu-Ray can actually use 1080 lines of vertical resolution is inaccurate. Many personal computers can use modern TVs as outboard displays, although there are lots of reports of problems. I am seriously thinking of upgrading to a 1080p screen simply so I can do slide-shows and home movies driven by my Mac.

All previous commentators represents the poorest and lawless segment of the market!Rich - and honest - consumers of course prefer the ultra - high quality of BD on a superb 50 inches - plus flat HD screen! The downloading is done only by young/poor pirates on peer to peer site like E-Mule! I saw some of this downloaded files: I can't understand how a civilised person could love destroying his eyes and ears with similar rubbish!Anyway, what I prefer best is cinema!!!!Good vision!

You were close to the correct conclusion with "consumers are perfectly happy to keep their entertainment libraries as downloaded files on hard-drives rather than in plastic packets on a shelf," and then you backed away and reverted back to a conclusion that Blu-Ray will dominate the next ten years. Why?Bandwidth will beat plastic discs, every time from now on. As we've seen with the explosive growth of .mp3 formats, people will accept a slightly lower-quality experience for instantaneous access and convenience. Downloadable movies will kill Blu-Ray.

Until Blu-Ray discs are only marginally more expensive than DVDs, I see no reason to buy them.Paying twice as much for quality that won't be noticed on a small screen or from afar doesn't seem sensible.